If you run a business with a WordPress website, you probably don't spend your days thinking about plugin updates, PHP versions, or whether your contact form is actually sending emails. And why would you? You've got a business to run.
But here's the thing — WordPress sites need looking after. Plugins get updated, things occasionally break, emails quietly stop delivering, and sometimes a payment gateway hiccups at the worst possible moment. The tricky part? These problems don't always announce themselves. A broken contact form doesn't send you a message saying "hey, I'm broken." It just... stops working. And you only find out when a customer says "I tried to get in touch but never heard back."
That's exactly why we built Guardian.
What is Guardian?
Guardian is a lightweight monitoring tool we've developed at Bollabo that sits quietly on your WordPress website and keeps an eye on the things that matter. It watches for the kind of issues that can slip under the radar and sends us the diagnostic information we need to act quickly — often before you even know there's a problem.
Here's what Guardian monitors:
Updates and compatibility — WordPress, plugins, and themes all need regular updates. Guardian lets us know when updates are available and flags anything that might cause a conflict, so we can handle updates safely rather than leaving things to chance.
PHP errors — These are the behind-the-scenes issues that can cause pages to load slowly, display incorrectly, or not load at all. Guardian catches these early so we can investigate before they become a bigger problem.
Forms and email delivery — Your contact form is one of the most important parts of your website. If it stops working or emails aren't being delivered, Guardian flags it. No more missed enquiries slipping through the cracks.
E-commerce health — If you sell online, Guardian watches for potential issues with your store — payment processing hiccups, checkout problems, and anything else that could cost you sales.
Site availability — The absolute worst-case scenario is your website going down and nobody knowing about it. Guardian monitors your site's availability so we can respond immediately if something goes wrong.
Why did we build it?
Because we wanted to be proactive, not reactive.
WordPress generates a lot of automated emails — update notifications, error alerts, security warnings — from every plugin on every site. Multiply that across dozens of websites and you're looking at hundreds of emails a day across multiple mailboxes. It's noisy, it's scattered, and it's not a reliable way to stay on top of things. We didn't want to wait for something to go wrong and hope we spotted it in time. We wanted a system that gives us a clear, centralised picture of every site's health so we can catch issues early and get ahead of them.
That's what Guardian does. It replaces the noise with clarity and lets us be proactive about looking after your website — reaching out to you if we spot something that needs attention, rather than waiting for you to come to us.
What about my data?
We want to be completely upfront about this: Guardian only sends diagnostic data. We don't receive any information about your orders, form submissions, customer details, or anything sensitive. Guardian is purely about the health of your website — is everything up to date, is everything working, is the site online. That's it.
What does this mean for you?
In practical terms, Guardian means fewer surprises. Instead of finding out about a problem when a customer complains — or worse, when you notice your sales have mysteriously dropped — we're already on it. Issues get caught earlier, fixed faster, and in many cases resolved before they have any impact on your business at all.
You don't need to do anything differently. Guardian works in the background, and we handle everything on our end. It's simply a better, more proactive way for us to look after your website.
We're rolling it out now
We're installing Guardian across all of our client websites — whether you have a support package with us or not. We built your website and we care about it continuing to work well for you. If Guardian picks up an issue, we'll be in touch to let you know and talk through the best way to get it sorted.
If you have any questions about how Guardian works or what it monitors, we're always happy to chat — just get in touch with the team.
Your website works hard for your business. Guardian makes sure we're working just as hard to keep it running smoothly.